by Robin Hardy
Creeping on stockinged feet, the length of the passage, he reached Alder MacGregor’s bedroom door. Peering inside he could see the fat man straining into the costume like a plump insect attempting to re-enter its chrysalis. Howie measured the distance he would have to travel before he reached the innkeeper, selected the exact place on the back of Alder’s neck where a karate blow with the side of the hand could make him unconscious without any lasting harm.
When he did it, when he hit Alder, it was so swift and with such economy of motion, that the innkeeper could hardly have spent more than an instant being aware of his assailant before he slumped to the floor, a breathing lump of matter, but otherwise inert. The Hand of Glory had, in a manner of speaking, boomeranged.
After he had bound and gagged Alder, it took several minutes for Howie to dress himself up as Punch. The hunchbacked jacket had to be wrestled off the limp but lumpy frame of the innkeeper without tearing its fine, cream-silk material. Where it had the scarlet medieval slashes on the sleeves it tended to catch on things and start to rip. When the sergeant saw the trousers, his resolve nearly failed him. Where the zip or fly-buttons of the trousers might otherwise have been was a huge, waving codpiece, cross-gartered in cherry-coloured silk. Howie was about to rip this obscene protuberance off the garment when he realized that to these dreadful people this ornamental phallus was an expected part of Punch. As a fairy might be thought incomplete without a wand!
He donned the whole costume and examined himself in the looking glass. There was something wrong. Then he realized that he looked more like a Pierrot than a Punch, because the costume hung on him in folds. A minute or so later he had stuffed a pillow into a quite convincing facsimile of Alder’s beer belly. Then he donned the mask and Punch’s three-pointed cap with a bell hanging from each corner.
Howie had closed the door on the unconscious innkeeper when, walking past the still-open closet from which Alder had taken his costume, he saw a short, thick stick attached by a string to an inflated pig’s bladder. Alder MacGregor must have momentarily forgotten it, thought Howie. Even if it was not a normal part of the costume he couldn’t risk leaving it behind. If he wanted to avoid having to talk to anyone he must arrive late for the procession’s start so that his silence could be taken as embarrassment. To be sent back for the bladder might be disastrous! While he was sure that the costume totally disguised him, he had no illusions that he could imitate the boozy, leprechauny tones of the man he was impersonating.
The sergeant rushed across the green towards the already formed-up procession like a recruit late on parade.
‘Come on, MacGregor!’ roared Lord Summerisle’s voice. ‘The girls are five minutes ahead of us. They’ll think the old boss isn’t going to catch them this year if we don’t hurry!’
Howie, who was only just learning how to squint through the eye slits, suddenly realized that a commanding female figure with long black hair, wearing a mauve lace dress that looked as if it had been discarded by an impoverished governess, was the person addressing him in the noble lord’s voice. When he saw the sneakers the figure wore he realized it was, indeed, Lord Summerisle. The Teaser himself.
The procession was facing so that it would have to pass down the High Street and then along a coast road, that Howie’d never so far travelled, in order to reach the stones. At their head, the Hobbyhorse plunged about like a temperamental racehorse before the start. Behind ‘the hoss’ Lord Summerisle capered about in his Teaser’s costume, and behind him Howie took his place in his disguise as Punch. Then came the swordsmen whom Howie/Punch had wanted to follow, but who obstinately fell in behind him.
There followed crowds of men dressed in animal masks–otters, badgers, foxes, eagles, stoats, and rats predominating. A ram carried the effigy of John Barleycorn held aloft, and the Salmon of Knowledge was there, and Old Brazen-face. Flanking the procession were the musicians–carrying drums, tambourines, hornpipes, bagpipes, whistles, and fiddles.
Three loud beats on the drum started the procession, at five past three p.m. The drum then continued to throb while the men who had previously heated the hot tar barrel rushed up to the Hobbyhorse with big brushes dripping tar, and proceeded to paint its vast hooped skirt while it plunged and whirled like a beast in mute pain. The hornpipes and three-holed whistles took up the beat, followed by the fiddles and, at last, the sustained drone of the bagpipes. Slowly the melody emerged as the men, for they were all men, launched themselves into the ancient Morris Dance Hornpipe, ‘Hunt the Squirrel’. The procession moved off down the High Street led by the great, plunging, prancing Hobbyhorse, dripping warm tar from its skirt and clacking its hinged jaw.
With a dance-drama on the move the best view is reserved for the birds. A bird’s-eye view of the procession, as it danced its way down the High Street, would have shown an extraordinary pattern of varying activity. At the rear, many of the dancers peeled off, and entered the houses on either side of the street, going out by the back doors to enter the next house by adjacent doors, and so emerge on the street again, to rejoin the procession. Many of these dancers carried branches of blossom and green leaves, which they left in the living rooms of the empty houses. At the end of the High Street nearest the harbour, the procession wheeled and headed for the open country along a road that led them into the open fields and orchards.
So fast did they move, once they were clear of the township, that they could soon see the dawdling, laughing women ahead of them.
As the men approached, the girls’ delighted shrieks of anticipation floated back to them on the wind. The procession surged forward, with the monstrous Hobbyhorse fair flying down the road, followed by the whirling Teaser, and the lumbering Punch.
The women and girls, who included every female of child-bearing age or over, were walking at no great pace, and continually looked back over their shoulders towards the advancing procession of men. The giggling and hysteria mounted the nearer the Hobbyhorse came, until suddenly with a darting, leaping run it was upon them, clacking at their heels, and swinging its skirts to smear their clothes with tar. Sometimes he managed to seize a girl and put her under his great skirt, only to release her a few seconds later squealing and blushing. Behind the foraging Hobbyhorse, Lord Summerisle, in his Teaser dress, danced wildly in counterpoint, his long black hair flying in the wind. But at his side Punch laboured badly. The disguised Howie’s performance plainly infuriated Lord Summerisle who had presumably rehearsed elaborately with the Alder Mac-Gregor he supposed to be his Punch.
‘What’s the matter with you, MacGregor?’ he complained. ‘Call that dancing? Cut some capers … Use your bladder … Play the Fool, man. That’s what you’re here for.’
Howie/Punch flicked his bladder feebly at a couple of girls who easily eluded him.
‘I suppose you’ve gone and got drunk at your own bar again!’ shouted Lord Summerisle, looking rather like Pocahontas’s aunt in a rage.
Suddenly the ranks of the retreating women broke, and Willow and Miss Rose danced forward. Both wore valentine masks, one of silver, the other of gold. They carried two long tong-shaped castanets in their hands which, to much laughter, they aimed at Punch, nipping at his codpiece and his bladder. Finally, to a roar of applause, he attacked them furiously with his bladder, driving them back to disappear into the crowd, now mixed more and more with the men.
‘That’s more like it! … Good!’ shouted Lord Summerisle. ‘Enjoy yourself, MacGregor! Today’s the day you play the Fool!’ The procession wound on its way: the Hobbyhorse snapped and darted; the women screamed and were sometimes ‘covered’; the Teaser pirouetted on his sneakers; Punch was mocked and retaliated; the sword dancers whiffled their swords from side to side and clanked them ritually together; the horn dancers advanced, retired, and crossed sides; the men in the animal masks danced and imitated the sound of the creatures they represented; the musicians banged and blew and scraped with gusto.
Howie had been kept so continuously busy, since his mad dash to join the
procession, that it had given him little time to think and less to observe. He welcomed their mistaken notion that he was drunk. It made his clumsy, studied movements more plausible. He gathered from Lord Summerisle’s urgings and the actions of the women, when the procession reached them, that he was supposed to be the butt of everybody’s fun, and that he too was supposed to bait the girls with his bladder, driving them under the flying skirts of the Hobbyhorse. He disliked doing this intensely because he’d noticed, as Oak’s great quilted skirt flew, that the man’s buttocks were as bare as the day his mother bore him, and that he’d clearly been chosen for the grossness of his ‘kidney-wiper’, which almost made the extravagance of Punch’s own codpiece seem paltry by comparison. The lewdness of it all sickened Howie but he kept his temper and went on gazing around for any sign of Rowan.
From the point of view of the great stones the music and screaming came to the hallowed circle faintly but clearly. Wood pigeons and jays and an occasional cuckoo flew up out of the oak trees to wheel overhead in the clear late afternoon sky, and hares bounded away from the dancers’ path into the undergrowth.
Inside the mask Howie started to feel a restriction that was other than purely physical. Not just the difficulty of seeing anything, save a kind of peephole view of his surroundings, but the fact that he was playing a role that demanded much of his concentration. The result, which he had not foreseen when he had decided to take on Alder’s part, was that he had no leisure to look carefully at every female islander in the procession to try to measure who might be under which mask. However, he did have the opportunity to start identifying some of the people he had met by the creatures they had chosen to represent.
It was easy to see that the thickset Boar was Dr Ewan, and his companion, the Red Fox, was clearly Mr Lennox. If Rowan was here, Howie wondered, would they have disguised her in so obvious a mask as that of a hare? Nevertheless, he looked for hares, and to his dismay saw that there were at least three of them, and while one was a man, Howie realized that there was sufficient duplication of bird and animal masks in the crowd to make this a doubtful means of recognition.
The oak woods were now behind them and the stones loomed ahead. The mood of the procession had undergone a subtle change as they approached the hallowed circle. Lord Summerisle now led, and he used the sickle and the mistletoe he carried in his hands like the conductor of an orchestra uses his baton. The music was quietened to a monotonous tuck-a-tuck of the drum. The Hobbyhorse was tamed to a gentle prance. The men and women had largely paired so that the whole gathering advanced in a double column behind the six swordsmen.
In this way, Lord Summerisle finally halted under the pediment of the principal portal stones that seemed like the natural entrance to the circle. Everyone behind him stopped while he held the mistletoe and sickle high above his head.
Howie wondered what he was supposed to do at this obviously prearranged signal. The swordsmen began slow marching, like soldiers at a funeral, to surround the dolmen stone at the centre of the circle. The Hobbyhorse hurried to the side opposite the Teaser and, in response to Lord Summerisle’s slow lowering of the mistletoe, the horse’s head bowed until it almost touched the ground. It then reared briefly and was still. The musicians took up a position just outside the circle while everyone else formed a single line behind Lord Summerisle. The swordsmen were watching the Teaser and waiting, but Lord Summerisle was staring at Punch, who had simply wandered into the circle as if he were a spectator and not a participant. Howie saw that he was in the wrong place and hurried to join the single line that was still being formed behind the laird. He watched Lord Summerisle’s back anxiously. Had he given himself away? Or was his presumed drunkenness going to save him from suspicion? What he dreaded was that it would become part of the ceremony for everyone to remove their masks before he had time to identify Rowan.
Lord Summerisle was making another ritualistic signal. He swept his sickle in a semicircular movement in front of him, as if he were miming the cutting of something. The watching swordsmen reacted instantly. The swords leapt up and were thrust together, forming a faultless knot. They held this laterally between them so that it was parallel to the dolmen stone that lay at their feet, flat with the ground. The swordsmen looked back at the Teaser expectantly.
‘Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!’ intoned Lord Summerisle.
The musicians started, at once, to play the opening bars of a tune that Howie was amazed to remember as a nursery rhyme: ‘Oranges and Lemons said the bells of Saint Clement’s … Here comes the chopper to chop off your head.’ At school he’d been told that the song dated from the great plague of London in the seventeenth century. He thought there had been a line that went ‘Bring out your dead said the Bells of Shoreditch.’ But with the melody over, Lord Summerisle and the whole congregation started to chant:
‘Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop …’
If the words were naïve and childlike or repetitious, the atmosphere in and around the circle of stones certainly wasn’t. Howie, who was trying desperately to see and search the masks of the people for any trace or hint of Rowan, believed he saw signals of fear from the tense body language of the crowd.
‘… Chop, chop, chop, chop,’ they all chorused continuously.
Now the knot was raised and the Teaser, Lord Summerisle, ran forward and stood on the dolmen. The swords descended, in time to the music, until the knot rested gently on Lord Summerisle’s shoulders. The crowd watched the swords intently now. After a double beat of the music, they were raised again and Lord Summerisle stepped briskly away from the dolmen to have his place taken by the next person in the line, a deer-man. The knot descended around the antlered figure’s neck; a double beat followed and the knot was raised. The deer bounded off the dolmen stone as if released from a pen.
This process was repeated with each person as their turn in the line came. Howie noticed that there was a sense of growing tension in the people ahead of him as their moment to have the knot about their necks approached. Even more remarkable was the way they nearly all cringed as they stood on the dolmen stone. Howie’s mind raced back to the children’s game that went with the nursery rhyme. It had been played often at Christmas parties for the kids back on the mainland.
Two people faced each other, he remembered, their hands clasped to make a sort of knot. They raised and lowered the knot to the rhythm of the music and when the sound stopped clasped the child they’d caught and he or she was then considered out. Howie supposed it represented what was once the apparently random choice of the plague for its victims. Perhaps it had, itself, been adapted from some earlier pagan practice such as he was now witnessing … but here the music hadn’t stopped, yet!
Howie tried to think it through step by logical step. The game here was not, as originally in the children’s version, simply one of elimination, until the remaining person was the winner. Perhaps the music would only stop once in this ‘game’ … and that was how the sacrificial victim was chosen? But if Rowan had already been selected, why go through all this? Love of ceremony and charades? That was possible, given Lord Summerisle’s extraordinary imagination. It occurred to Howie that perhaps only a small clique knew that Rowan was the ‘chosen one’. Hence, the apparent fear of some as they came under the knot. He strained to see who was ahead of him, in case there was some risk of Rowan being among them, but it was hard from his in-line perspective to see. By this time a great many spectators who had already braved the knot stood about inside the circle watching. Howie decided to risk getting out of line and mingling with these people, the better to look out for a possible Rowan.
Once he had edged some ten yards from the line he could see that the next fifteen persons in line for the knot were mostly men and the few women among them, people whom he easily recognized like Miss Rose and Willow and Old Swallow. No teenage girls, not even any hares. But there were at least a hundred people still to come.
Howie was wondering if he dare wander down the line
looking for Rowan when he felt a hand come and grab him by the nose. He hung onto the Punch mask fearing he was about to be found out and unable to see whose hand it was through the eye slits. A deep voice in his ear soon told him:
‘Everyone must go through, MacGregor. It’s a game of chance. Remember?’ breathed Lord Summerisle.
Howie felt himself being pulled back to the line and inserted into it about three people from the knot. What will happen when the music stops? Could it, Howie wondered, possibly stop when he was the one on the stone? The answer was of course it could. He was still trying to follow his line of deductive reasoning. Since he knew for certain that Rowan was the intended sacrifice, was it possible that the person who was about to be chosen here was the person who would carry out the sacrificial act? After all, being the executioner was never a popular role. That would explain the whole community having to go through the knot so that the killer would be chosen by pure chance, but still represent the whole community in whose name he killed. The actual sacrifice was to be made on a beach. Lord Summerisle had already announced this so the sergeant still believed he had a little time.
It was Howie’s turn next, after a frog whose head was a particularly bilious green. The sergeant knew now what he would do if the music stopped while he was under the knot. Since it seemed practically certain he would have to unmask, he was determined to make his speech then and there, grabbing the knot so as to disarm the swordsmen. He would appeal to them all in the name of their sovereign, the Queen of Scotland, whose crown he wore on his uniform under the Punch costume. He would offer to intercede for them with the authorities in return for their immediate handing over of Rowan Morrison. He would explain the ‘conspiracy law’ and the law relating to being ‘accessories to attempted murder’, if, please God, he was now proved wrong in his wild thought that they intended to devour an already slain sacrifice. If a ritual killer was being chosen by the chop chop game, it pointed to the fact that he or she must have a live someone to kill. Rowan, of course.
